So, I love my Nook. I love the touch screen navigation, and the convenience of having a library at my side at all times. I love to browse the Barnes and Noble website, looking for new books. I would and have recommended the Nook vigorously to anyone who’s asked about it.

But something tells me that I may have backed the wrong horse in the eReader race…

And all of a sudden, Barnes and Noble’s financial woes become crystal clear.

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Shocking, I know, but how else would you explain the note left on my door today?

We’ve got the cutesy handwriting and the purposeful misspellings (unless the author of this note honestly can’t spell “please”, “night” or “thanks”, in which case, she has bigger problems than a barking Lulu). The random swearing and the passive-aggressive nature has me confused, though. These weren’t qualities that I normally attributed to LOLcats.

If we were to look at option number two, I’d almost think that this was a Mormon schoolgirl who knows she’s not going to get in trouble for swearing at a stranger if she remains anonymous. I think she failed to take into account the fact that the random swearing and the misspelled words make me much less likely to take this seriously than if she had taken a respectful tone.

So, to my neighbor who doesn’t have the courage to face me herself:

I’m sorry about Lulu. I’ve been working on keeping her quiet for the past three years. It has gotten much better, I promise, although I do acknowledge that we have a long way to go yet.

I would like to keep her inside all day, but there are times when I can’t be home to take her for a walk before she needs to relieve herself. This is the reason I have the dog door onto my balcony, so she can go outside, in the little yard I had built for her, and not on my carpet.

Again, I apologize for her noisy behavior. We are working on it. I wish you had told me who you are so I can explain this to you in person, and not on my obscure blog that you probably aren’t going to read.

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I didn't have my camera, and my phone takes lousy pictures, so you get to see the sign in it's original packaging.

As I was walking through the parking lot to the bus stop on my way home from class today, I spotted a car with a sign in the window that read “Caution! Baby Inside”. The image was what appeared to be a giant floating head over a banana (a quick internet search when I made it home told me that I was right about the banana, at least, but the sign didn’t specify a baby what.)

The sign made me think of nothing so much as the notices placed on cages that transport animals of various degrees of domestication from place to place, and I had to wonder: What is so scary about babies that I need to be cautious? If I got too close to the car, would it growl at me? Would it snap at my fingers if I tried to pet it? If I feed it my peanuts or bread crusts would it become too used to adults, and start following random people around begging for food? (Come to think of it, that may have been what happened with my 15 month old nephew, E.)

I then started to wonder what a dangerous baby was doing being left alone in a car in a college parking lot–sure the caretakers could have removed the infant and left the sign, but that would be irresponsible–why make people worry about being attacked by a baby when there is no baby present?

The day was chilly, bordering on cold, so I wasn’t worried about the baby overheating–but I wasn’t going to check on it if I was being warned of it’s presence. But still, should I notify someone that there is a dangerous infant alone in a car? Surely whoever is responsible for those types of situations would be trained in how to deal with dangerous creatures, such as the baby we were being warned of. But what if it wasn’t there? Would that mean that it got loose? Is there a baby wandering around campus, savaging innocent students as they study or wait for their classes? What if it was in the bushes surrounding the bus stop? What if it had its sights set on me?

Fortunately, at this point in time, my bus came, and I managed to make it home without being attacked by a rabid toddler. I’m going to make sure to lock my doors and windows tonight, though, just to make sure no infants get into my house. Because, from what I hear, once you have a baby, there’s no getting rid of it.

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Upon giving myself a few extra minutes to get to the bus stop, I stopped and checked my mail. This has become a regular thing since starting school. I think I must be confusing the hell out of the mail-lady.

Anyway, upon sorting through the flyers, advertisements, postcards from local politicians who don’t realize that sending me that stuff makes me less likely to vote for them, and bills (seriously, what’s with all the bills? I paid for electricity like a month ago) I found this:

Do. Not. Want. Also: I'm really bad at opening envelopes.

Cue the hasty exit of any sense of calmness and rationality.

As I was waiting for the bus, I left the mail in the mailbox, with the plan of picking it up on the way back from school. And, for some reason, (crazy, huh) I couldn’t stop thinking about this letter from the IRS.

Why were they sending me a letter? It’s not a check, it’s a letter. What do they want? This could be really bad. But, if it was really bad, it would have been a certified letter, or someone would have come and knocked on my door in person, right? That’s what happens on TV and in the movies, right? They just sent me a check for $37. Do they want their $37 back? I already spent it. Okay, so it wouldn’t be hard to find another $37… and so on and so forth.

Finally (I missed the bus I wanted to get on, but that’s okay because it was running early, so I wasn’t late for class or anything) I went back to the mailbox and pulled out the letter. I figured if I was going to be freaking out, I might as well see if there was something worth freaking out over. It could be nothing after all. Never mind that even when it’s nothing, in my head, it’s never nothing.

Upon opening the envelope, I discovered this:

So, instead of including a note in envelope with the check for $37, they sent me another piece of mail, telling me that they sent me a check for $37. Bureaucracy, folks.

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12 am: Decide it’s time for bed, and begin preparing for it. Walk the dogs, brush the teeth, take a shower, wash face, etc.

12:30 am: go to bed. Remember you have to make a phone call in the morning to set up an appointment with your academic advisor. Get out of bed. Find the card with your academic advisor’s name, phone number, and office location on it. Realize that you don’t know what the two-letter abbreviation for the building where your advisor’s office is stands for. Spend the next 5 minutes looking for a map of campus, then the next 15 unsuccessfully looking for the building abbreviation. Decide that you can’t find it because you’re too tired, and put it off until the morning.

12:50 am: Go back to bed. Stress about school. Toss and turn for an hour.

2 am: Get up, and try to write. Realize that everything you’re writing is either too melodramatic, or junk. Get distracted while on the computer, and play Facebook games.

3 am: Get startled a) by the time, and b) that your father has gotten up and is checking Facebook before he goes to work. Be embarrassed by the fact that you haven’t gone to sleep yet. Close Facebook, and try to go to bed. Toss and turn.

3:30 am: Unable to sleep, realize how bad the dogs smell, and that you’ve been threatening to bathe them for a week. Get up, and give the dogs a bath.

4 am: Be grateful that your downstairs neighbor is out-of-town, and that the roommate is spending the night at a friend’s house while Max and Lulu try to out run their wet fur.

4:30 am: spread a towel over the blankets where the dogs usually sleep to avoid getting the wet dog smell on your bed, now that they’ve burned off all that energy. Read for a bit. Listen to the dogs snore.

4:45 am: decide that you’re now tired enough for sleep, and shut off the light. Just as you are falling asleep, hear Lulu yelp in her sleep, get up, and want to cuddle with you. You are now, once again, fully awake.

5 am: having calmed Lulu down, pull the computer back out. Start a new town on the Sims, and spend then next hour and a half setting up said town, while doing some more bad/overly melodramatic writing.

6:30 am: realize it’s getting light outside, and check the clock. Debate the pros and cons of getting dressed to take the dogs out again. Stall.

6:45 am: get up, get dressed, take the dogs out. Recoil like a vampire from the early morning light. (12:30 pm realize while writing the post that this is potentially a bad simile, and spend a ridiculous amount of time researching vampires for a throw-away joke, only to realize, that you don’t really care.)

7 am: Go back to bed. Hear the roommate come home, have the dogs go and investigate.

7:15 am: The dogs, having been satisfied that they know the person who just entered our home, now come back to you. Give in to Lulu’s begging to be picked up and placed on the bed. Expect Max to steal the comfortable spot you’ve just made for yourself while picking Lulu up, then get annoyed when you tell/force him to move.

7:20 am: hear the roommate leave for work.

7:45 am: finally fall asleep.

11 am: wake up when someone sends you a text message. Decide that it’s too late to go back to sleep, drift back to sleep for a few minutes anyway.

11:45 am: wake up again, decide you absolutely need to get up. Expect mocking stares from the dogs as you stumble into the bathroom to “begin” your day.

12 pm: start blogging about the horrible night you had.

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I actually went to sleep at a decent time, then woke up when both dogs, having been “mysteriously” forced off the bed by someone who is an active sleeper (whoops) started barking at me to let them back on the bed.

I then decided that I wasn’t going to go back to sleep, because of the heartburn, and the runny nose, and the general lack of sleepiness.

That’s okay, I’m a hypochondriac, and have the medicine collection to prove it.

Now, even though I’m a hypochondriac, I don’t like taking any more medicine than I strictly have to(hence my problem “forgetting” to take my anti-depressant). So, zantac (or the generic version thereof) for the heartburn. I’ve known for a while that most sleeping pills contain the same medicine as benadryl (or the generic version thereof) so I compared labels, to figure out if I wanted to take an allergy pill or a sleeping pill. This is what I discovered:

Okay, it’s hard to see, but they contain the exact same amount of the exact same medicine.

Wal-Mart, I’m feeling ripped off.

Granted I don’t really know why, I doubt I paid more than $3 for either bottle of pills, and they each came with 100 capsules.

Just to make things absolutely clear as to the label for both of those bottles:

For the record, the sleeping pills won, just because they’re smaller. And now I’m sitting here with the jingle from the Friskies commercial where you get a cat’s eye view of a catnip trip stuck in my head (you know the one) waiting for it to kick in enough that I can go back to sleep.

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As I start to write this, it’s just shy of 4 am. I haven’t been to bed yet. What have I been doing all night long? Absolutely nothing. Okay, that’s not true, I’m playing SimCity, but as that’s a game that requires a lot of waiting, it amounts to absolutely nothing.

Anyway, a few hours ago, I decided that it was time to go to bed. I was just about to take the dogs out for a walk, when I heard a loud pop, then another one, right outside my window. That’s not a good sound at 2 am.

The crazy worrier in me starts thinking gunshots, but the calm logical part of me who rarely gets a voice reminded me that I was watching Law and Order earlier, and I live in a safe neighborhood. Firecrackers, then, but I didn’t hear any talking or laughing–or shouting for that matter, sounds which experience, and the TV tells me often accompany things like firecrackers and gunshots.

So now, I’m too scared to walk the dogs, but also know that it was probably nothing and not worth calling the police over. So I sit and do nothing, while the treasury of my fake city grows.

Then, an hour or so later, I hear a car drive into the parking lot, and I hear the sound again. Only, this time, it seems distinctly metallic. Like, a can or a sheet of metal that hits against the speed bump right outside my balcony after someone drove over it.

Yeah, I felt stupid. But, in my defense, I’d been awake for like 20 hours at this point.